Twilight of Bronze · public · first seen
This update is the biggest change to how you can play Twilight of Bronze since launch. Until now, you always started as one person at the edge of history. Now you can also start at the top: on the throne of an established realm, running its armies, treasury, court and wars.
Below is a recap of the headline systems, followed by the smaller improvements that add up across the rest of the game.
New Game now asks what kind of campaign you want:
Character Campaign: the original game. You start as a wanderer and build a life from nothing.
Grand Strategy Campaign: you pick an era, choose any surviving landed realm, and create a ruler with a Commander, Diplomat or Steward focus. The campaign starts paused at that realm's capital.
The strategy view uses the same living world as the character game. It is a political map of the same simulation, not a separate mode, so the wars, famines and collapses you would see as a wanderer are the ones you now have to manage.
From the strategy view you can:
Command your forces. Cycle through your realm's field armies and garrisons, then give orders: Move, Defend, Raid or Siege. Orders stay with a force through saves and captures. Garrisons hold their cities, and raids and sieges can only target realms you're at war with.
Manage your settlements. A realm-wide management screen covers upkeep, barracks, taxation and military controls, and lists every patrol, garrison and raised band you have.
Run a court. Five power blocs back or obstruct you. Their loyalty pushes your realm's stability up or down every month. You can handle a single bad month, but ignoring a seditious court for years will catch up with you.
Issue decrees. One-time royal actions with their own costs, effects and cooldowns.
Wage war on your own terms. Declare war with a specific objective, and negotiate peace terms backed by your war score.
Inspect anything. A look cursor shows the terrain, realm, settlement or unit on any tile.
New worlds also give each realm a seed-stable starting treasury of roughly 9–15 months of taxes and a varied manpower reserve. Established realms start with historically inspired policies. Egypt, for example, starts with its God-King and Temple Economy institutions.
The two campaigns are connected. If your character rules a realm, press F4 while standing on your capital to switch to Grand Strategy. Press it again to return to character play. You can found or seize a realm as a wanderer and then govern it from the throne.
Losing your capital moves the seat of government to your largest surviving settlement. Losing every settlement ends your rule, but your character's story goes on.
Settlements now have real economies. Each town works out its trades from the live simulation: farmers, herders, fishermen, bakers, brewers, potters, weavers, carpenters, tanners, bronzesmiths, purple-dyers and scribes. Those trades decide:
what the local shops stock,
which workshops you can rent for crafting,
and what you'll find inside people's homes and workplaces.
Town descriptions show this too ("Known for its potters and weavers"), so you can tell what a place is good for before you shop there.
Buildings are now furnished with chests, jar racks, amphorae, baskets and shelves along their walls, and you can search them. Loot tables depend on the furniture, the building, the town's trades, the local culture and the building's condition.
Taking things from someone's home or workshop is theft. Stolen goods are marked, anyone who sees you may shout "Thief!", and followers of YHWH should remember that coveting your neighbour's goods costs piety.
Crafting has been rebuilt around where you are and what tools you carry.
Stations. A lit campfire, your outpost's buildings, or the rented workshops of the town you're in (forges, kilns, looms) all count as stations. The crafting screen shows which ones are available. Using a town's workshops costs a small fee in copper pins.
Tool qualities. Recipes now ask for qualities such as cutting, hammering or a crucible instead of one specific tool. Any suitable tool works, and the game wears down your weakest tool that meets the requirement, so your best tools are spared.
Alternative materials. Recipes can accept substitutes, such as a log or a plank.
Batch crafting. Press Q to make several of something in one go. The batch stops cleanly and tells you why if you run out of materials.
A data-driven item catalogue (items.json) and a much larger recipe list, which also makes all of this easier to mod.
Trading got a round of tuning to make it more honest and more regional:
Regional goods. Egyptian linen, Anatolian copper and Levantine purple dye are cheapest near where they're made and worth more far away.
Trade rumours quote buy and sell prices from the live market rules. The profit percentage is the real gross margin before haggling.
Tighter haggling. Merchants won't consider offers below 85% of their buying price or above 120% of their selling price. Trade skill improves your odds within that range.
No more arbitrage loops. Every market keeps a buy/sell spread, even for bulk purchases and livestock. Used pack animals sell for less than new ones, with health affecting the price (hunger and thirst don't).
The game now ships with Earth and Empire, a graphical texture pack. The CP437 style is still there for anyone who prefers it.
The texture pack system has been greatly expanded to cover:
the overworld, towns, camps and local maps,
temple dungeons, with floors recoloured to each temple's palette, lighting that dims sprites smoothly, and traps that stay hidden until spotted,
layered character sprites for the player and every local NPC. Skin tone, hair colour and clothing dye are recoloured on the fly, and NPCs are dressed by their role and local culture.
The local map also shows boats: when you're at sea, your ship appears with its own hull shape and deck layout depending on the type of boat you own.
Characters can now develop a Personal Code, a guiding principle that changes how their life feels from day to day: Honor-Bound, Compassionate, Ambitious, Ruthless, Devout, Skeptical, Disciplined, Impulsive, Watchful or Communal, plus background codes such as Chieftain's Duty and Desert Survivor.
Codes affect mood in specific situations. A Devout character finds rest in temple quarters sacred, a Skeptic is uneasy there, an Ambitious character is cheered by a good profit, and a Disciplined one holds up better under hardship.
Wild animals now roam the world map. They aren't hostile, avoid busy settlements, and can be hunted from nearby tiles.
Better onboarding warnings. You get a clear warning if you set out with no food or water.
Tutorial fix. The bounty tutorial now explains how to start the fight with the looter.
Character creation warns you if you try to continue with unspent points.
Character creation has a new step: choosing between a Historical World and a Mythic World. Historical is the Late Bronze Age as it was, with no supernatural beings. Mythic will keep the same history but add rare, culturally grounded beings of legend to the wild places, which you can meet, avoid, aid, bargain with or fight.
This update lays the foundations: the world mode, saving it with each world (successor characters inherit it), and the core rules for how these beings behave. Historical worlds are completely unaffected. They never draw a single extra random number for mythic content. The first creatures will arrive in a later update.
Text Size setting for players on large or high-resolution displays.
New minimap toggle (F3) and overworld zoom cycling (Z).
Dungeon controls are now documented in the in-game codex.
Combat codex entries now explain how spears, shields and daggers suit different situations.
Faster world simulation. Bands now use a spatial grid for "who's nearby?" checks instead of scanning every band in the world. This is a big help in late-game worlds full of armies, merchants and refugees.
Editor improvements. The map and civilization editor has expanded layer painting, flood fill, city placement and civ editing tools.
Updated world map data for the Bronze Age known world.
Demo build support, for a free demo that runs for six in-game months.
Debug builds now optimize dependencies, so development builds are actually playable.
Localization updates for all 11 supported languages.
Build and release workflow cleanup for Windows, Linux and macOS.
The Character Campaign is still the heart of the game. The goal of this update was to make the world itself something you can hold. You can climb from wanderer to king and then govern what you've won, or start as a ruler and see how long your dynasty survives the end of the Bronze Age.
Next up: deeper decrees and court events, more realm-specific institutions, the first Mythic World creatures, and making town economies respond even more to war, drought and trade.
Thank you for playing, and as always, bug reports and feedback are very welcome.
| Depot | New manifest | Previous manifest |
|---|---|---|
| 4601441 | 5461788893670620707 | — |
| 4601442 | 497157066225316296 | — |
| 4601443 | 1124065307378255888 | — |